Yoast SEO 4.0: lightning fast internal linking

After months of hard work, we are ready to show Yoast SEO 4.0 to the world. In this version, we’re shipping an awesome Premium feature that many of you will find very, very helpful. We’ve figured out how to make the search for related posts to link to, fast and faultless. In this post, we’ll explain what you can expect.

After months of hard work, we are ready to show Yoast SEO 4.0 to the world. In this version, we’re shipping an awesome Premium feature that many of you will find very, very helpful. We’ve figured out how to make the search for related posts to link to, fast and faultless. In this post, we’ll explain what you can expect.

Historically, related links plugins did one thing well: add unnecessary overhead to your site. The performance was less than stellar and the search results subpar. In addition to that, related posts where often presented in a separate box, instead of directly in the post, where they belong. It’s hard to solve this complex issue, but we’ve managed to do it.

Premium customers of Yoast SEO will now find a new box on the right-hand side of your site, called Yoast Internal Linking. This box shows a couple of links that are proven to be relevant to the text you are working on. It uses the most prominent words from the previously introduced Yoast SEO Insights tool to find posts that use the same words.

Lightning fast, faultless linking

To get the most out of the internal linking tool, you need to calculate the most prominent words for your complete site. To help you with that, there is now a feature called Site wide analysis, where you can turn on the analysis it needs to do its work. The initial indexation may take a while, depending on the size of your site. You can see the progress in the tab. In the future, we will be making it even faster. In addition to that, we will also introduce a CLI that large scale sites can use to trigger the indexation process.

Updates in Yoast SEO 4.0

Besides the very useful Internal Linking feature in Yoast SEO 4.0 Premium, there are also some nice additions to the regular version. It’s now fully compatible with WordPress 4.7, including support for the user selectable language in the dashboard. We’ve also been working hard on improving the support in the content analysis for French and German. We understand transition words in French better. Manuel Augustin helped us add support for the recognition of passive voice in German.

We hope you are as excited as we are! Download the new version now and let us know what you think. We love to hear from you.